Taking back our communities

I27

I think we need to recognize that we want to get to that point where we're really taking back...our community. It's not that I'm opposed to violent stuff, it's just that we need to do the groundwork so we can lay that out. That requires collective decisions, patience, and getting to that point is not something that just happens right away. [That’s] one [of the] thing[s] I can appreciate...about the Zapatistas, they went into the jungle in 1983 and didn't come out until 1994...and I think that's something that we need to think about.

Indigenous knowledge

I7

You learn about history and all the really bad stuff that has happened, to the Indigenous population particularly, and I was like, wow, what keeps people motivated there?...if human society is going to get through what we're going through now, it's going to be because of the knowledge of indigenous peoples. I feel like there's that wealth of knowledge there that's just not tapped in the mainstream and it's the total opposite of the dominant culture.

Moving on

I21

I think that your generation is starting ahead of where my generation started and that brings me some hope. Now I think there are a bunch of things that I think you guys are doing that is totally as stupid as we did but there are things that I think you are thinking about, and concerned about, and critical about, and open about that was not reflected in the left wing movements of the sixties and seventies….there were many things we couldn't have known. But I think this generation of activists has a body of knowledge based on the trajectory of things that have happened in the last thirty, forty years that you are actually more humble about.

Imagining the future together

I21

I'm sitting on this side of the river saying ‘I'm happy to cross over with you,’ I don't know what the bridge looks like, but I think we have to sustain this bank of the river so that it doesn't collapse on our way to that one. Because I do not have sufficient radical imagination to know how we're going to get from here to what I imagine for the future, I don't have that. I don't think that gives me an excuse not to keep on keeping on because I think the struggle against slavery in the United States took four hundred years. I've been working for about forty and not consistently….I'm saddened that I don't have the imagination to understand [how] we're going to get from a and b but I think we need to discuss how we're going to get from a to b together because there are smarter people than me.

Post-activism

I2

Recently, as a result of being in a family, [I’ve] really change[d] the way...I'm socially engaging with…[the] activist community….I feel like there was a certain point at which I started to admire people that I considered post-activist. What I [mean] by that is that being an activist or revolutionary or whatever as your main title, that is abstract and has nothing to communicate other than that you feel righteously busy. [It’s] not something that...I want to identify [as] and I feel like there are some other really important things, really important roles....I want to be a good son to my parents, I want to be a good brother to my brother, I want to be a good parent, I want to be a good partner.

Managing disagreement effectively

I18

Thoughtless action is obviously going to lead to unintended consequences and it's going to be less effective than if you are measured and considered and reasonable and have a plan and account for contingencies....I think it's really important but at the same time I think that the left does suffer from too much...crippling talk. There should be more mechanisms in left wing groups if there is a major point of disagreement to compartmentalize that disagreement, and not to ignore it, but to defer it...until we're effective with all the stuff we agree with.

No going back

I27

I always think it's really exciting when people...move...and I think that the key thing…[is] not necessarily to take them and show them exactly what to do, but [to show them] there's no going back. They're either going to win or they're going to fucking lose and I think that's an important position. To push people out to taking those risks that they wouldn't normally want to take and getting them to feel like that's their decision, feeling empowered, and then creating that contrast, and then there's no going back, you're pretty much taking a leap.

The fetish of the local

I5

I don't want to be programmatic about it but I certainly think there's something to the anarchist vision of free federated collectivities that makes a lot of sense to me. But I also agree that that's utopian in some ways, in the sense that I think that we will not solve the crises we currently face by retreating to the local, and imagining the local as a space that we can create a little life boat, and by growing our food locally, and by having very nice community assemblies, and by trying to just retreat to this imagined space of hearth and home that we'll somehow escape what's coming because it's only in building lines of communication and solidarity that we'll do that. I think that that's part of what it would mean to win to me. I'm not interested in creating a world or being part of a project that creates a world that revels in parochialism.

A world without rape culture

I11

I try and imagine a world without rape culture sometimes and it's pretty exciting.

Grassroots organizing

I14

I don't think you can be a socialist on your own. You can hold all the theories, you can believe everything that I agree with, but you're not going to be a socialist until you're actually working and also meeting folks in the labour movement, or childcare workers who make $10 an hour, or the crosswalk guards who just got organized, it really just changes your perspective about what the left needs to do to reach the mass of people because way too often I feel we're stuck in universities and academic settings.